Consent of the governed is one of those political clichés that people utter without thinking. They refuse to go through the exercise I call ‘the art of the next question’.
In this case, the next question is: “Yes, but what does it actually mean?” The question isn’t rhetorical – I genuinely struggle with the concept.
And I’m sure many people must have felt the same during the centuries the term has been either used or alluded to. Quite a few centuries, actually.
Thus, for example, Tertullian (d. 240 AD), the first major theologian to write in Latin: “It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too.”
Tertullian, however, didn’t express that attractive idea in political terms. That achievement had to wait until the Enlightenment that, among its other failings, sought to redefine the source of a government’s legitimacy.
As it did with everything, the Enlightenment replaced something concrete and time-proven with a freshly baked abstraction.
In the past, it was widely accepted that political power derived from some sort of hereditary claim, sometimes but not invariably expressed as the divine right of kings. People generally regarded dynastic rule as just and only rebelled when kings turned into tyrants.
However, words like ‘divine’ and ‘kings’ were repulsive to Enlightenment thinkers, starting with their guiding light, John Locke. Locke argued that a government is only ever lawful if the people agree to be governed.
They express that agreement in a social contract, thereby they consent to be governed in exchange for the state’s undertaking to protect their natural rights to “life, liberty and estate”. The first state constituted on Locke’s principles, the US, changed ‘estate’ to ‘happiness’ and protection to ‘pursuit’, which I don’t think was an improvement.
Still, like most abstract ideas, this sounds good in theory, but what does it mean in practice? Let’s leave the past for the present and look at Britain, circa 2025.
Starmer and his accomplices are running the country into the ground, which is now clear even to most people who voted Labour in last year. Starmer’s current approval ratings make him not only the most unpopular prime minister in British history, but even the least popular leader in today’s West.
Yet he won the election with a 174-seat majority, which is supposed to give him the mandate to reduce the country to a Third World status. By voting Labour, the people honoured their part of the social contract and agreed to be governed.
But how many people? I’m not going to compare our electoral system of first-past-the-post with proportional representation. Both have pluses and minuses, and in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems.
Still, it’s worth mentioning that Starmer got his mandate from only a third of those who exercised their right to vote (33.7 per cent, to be pedantic about it) and just over 20 per cent of the whole population. Neither I nor any of my friends nor, more important, almost 80 per cent of the people voted Labour, yet those who did expressed consent on our behalf. Does this strike you as odd? At all?
Labour’s vote share was the lowest any majority party has ever received on record, which makes it the least proportional winner in British history. Thus, if we use words in their real, rather than virtual, sense, consent of the governed was neither given nor really sought. A small minority sufficed.
Most people will just shrug their shoulders. This is the way the system works, live with it. Any system is bound to malfunction now and then, such is life.
The problem with this system is that it malfunctions not occasionally but invariably. The minority of those who feel entitled to give consent on behalf of the majority may at times be higher than in 2024, but it hardly ever gets to even 50 per cent.
Thus Thomas Jefferson was right substantively but not numerically when he wrote: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” (Parenthetically, Americans who see Jefferson as a champion of their democracy ought to read what he actually wrote on the subject of what Aristotle called a “deviant constitution”.)
Fifty-one per cent? You wish. What about twenty? My point is that the very term ‘consent of the governed’ has glossocratic value but no other. The same goes for ‘social contract’, first mentioned by Hobbes if I’m not mistaken.
It’s not a real contract, is it? Any contract I’ve ever seen or signed had a cancellation clause, conditions under which it could be terminated. So how can the British people, most of whom realise they made a terrible mistake in 2024, withdraw their consent?
They could vote Labour out, but the next opportunity to do so will present itself in 2029. Once elected with a large parliamentary majority, a government can do as it pleases for five years. This brings back times olden, when a city taken by military assault was given over to the victorious soldiers for three days of rape and plunder.
In theory, a government could be driven out by a parliamentary vote of no confidence, but this isn’t going to happen when the majority is as high as it is now. If another general election were held today, most Labour MPs, including cabinet members, would lose their seats. Hence, anyone who thinks MPs could ever vote for their own political suicide shows a touching but misplaced trust in human goodness.
A revolution becomes the only choice. Not to cut too fine a point, by pushing their theory Hobbes and Locke were issuing a carte blanche to arbitrary violence as the only option for withdrawing ‘consent’ never given in the first place.
You may argue that, although it’s next to impossible to oust a particular government laying waste to the country, the social contract endorsing our system of governance remains valid.
This sounds even more preposterous. In effect, it means that a small minority of the population may issue consent not only on behalf of all their contemporaries, but also for the generations to come. So let’s say that, when the perpetrators of the Glorious Revolution agreed in 1688 to a certain constitutional arrangement, they effectively removed the right of the people to terminate the contract centuries later. Sounds illogical, doesn’t it?
A wise man once told me that, when there is always something wrong with the way a system works, there is probably something wrong with the system as such.
Yet anyone who these days suggests there may be something systemically wrong with democracy (‘consent of the governed’, ‘social contract’ and so on) is likely to hear Churchill’s pronouncement that: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
However, it’s useful to remember that Churchill’s view of democracy was formed in Victorian and Edwardian times, when only a third of the men and none of the women were qualified to vote.
Surely, Churchill’s less publicised statement, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” was closer to the truth, which is another example of a putative admirer of democracy either having second thoughts or not being such a fervent admirer in the first place.
You’ve doubtless noticed that my thinking on the subject contains more questions than answers. But then that’s the case with any serious thought on political subjects, as opposed to that dread word, ideology.
Another excellent article. I suppose the vast numbers of eligible voters who do not vote can be said to not give their consent. For the 2024 presidential election, the national percentage of voters was reported at 65.3% (that seems high, as it has been fluctuating between 55% and 61%). Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, or 32.5% of the eligible votes. Those not voting constituted 34.7% of eligible voters. Should we conclude that consent was not given?
How does one reconcile Tertullian’s statement that “those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction [that a law is just] too”, with Jefferson’s “mob rule”? If the majority of the people feel a law is unjust, should it be repealed? How do we consider people’s thoughts versus voting decisions? By which I mean that while someone may know an action is wrong, he may vote out a law of which he himself does not want to be convicted (old laws against adultery come to mind). An interesting topic of debate, were debate still possible in our uncivil society. (This might warrant a letter of suggestion to Firing Line, which is still on the air, though I have not watched in decades.)